[Doc-SIG] reStructuredText-to-HTML XSLT

Tony J Ibbs (Tibs) tony@lsl.co.uk
Wed, 17 Oct 2001 09:53:00 +0100


David Goodger wrote:
> I'm going to experiment with xml.dom.minidom to try to get
> better XML output wrt whitespace. The trouble is that
> newlines are interpreted as spaces in mixed content, so
> I've got to figure out a way to avoid newlines before &
> after inline markup. We may have to give up newlines between
> body elements also though.

Hmm. If I understand what you're saying, then surely one just needs to
emit XML without putting in any extraneous whitespace? We already have
"pretty" mode, which can produce XML that is aimed at a human (i.e., has
indentation, etc.), but I don't see why one shouldn't represent the
tree::

   <document>
      <paragraph>
          Some text
          <emphasis>
             more text.

(to invent an artifical and wrong example) as the XML::

   <document><paragraph>Some text <emphasis>more
text.</emphasis></paragraph></document>

In other words, the only whitespace outside <...> is that which the user
typed...

Tibs

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Tony J Ibbs (Tibs)      http://www.tibsnjoan.co.uk/
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